weewillywinky

I found the original post very useful especially the bits about using WinImage to create a bootimage with an extended format and the "for....do" loop in autoexec.bat to search for the image. It would seem that although a lot of people want to do similar things no shoe fits all. We for example look after staff systems at our university. Because there is no central purchasing each school of department buys there own PCs. Therefore the systems we work on are similar but often from different suppliers. With much trial and error and after many hours we have created an image that works on the majority of our P4 systems. We used to deliver our images across the network by booting the PC to be re-imaged/installed from a floppy disk which would load DOS network drivers and Novell client. This allowed us to connect to a dedicated server which contained the required image. This also allowed us to use the server as a backup device. We often backup users machines prior to re-imaging just in case it all goes pear shaped and so that we can preserve users data. Unfortunately some of the new systems came with network cards which had no DOS drivers. We had to find an alternative system. Our solution. We use a combination of BartPE,Ghost32 and USB HD (Freecom). Here's how it works. We boot the PC using the BartPE CD we created. The USB HD MUST BE CONNECTED during the bootup or it will not be visable later. The BartPE CD contains Ghost32. Using Ghost booted from the BartPE CD allows us to either backup the system to the attached USB HD and/or re-image the system from an image stored on the USB HD. USB2 is fast! You can transfer an image onto a system pretty quickly using this method. It is actually faster than from a CD/DVD or over the network. I recommend it highly. As an alternative method of image distribution we also have our bootable DVD. Our config.sys and autoexec.bat files look like this: config.sys .......................................................................... CODE [menu] menucolor=15,1 menuitem=ONE, Install new image onto this machine? menuitem=TWO, Run Ghost Walker (Dos) [COMMON] device=a:\Dos\himem.sys /testmem:off dos=high,umb files=60 buffers=30 stacks=9,256 shell=a:\command.com a:\ /e:1024 /p [ONE] devicehigh=a:\Dos\atapicd.sys /D:cd1 [TWO] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- autoexec.bat .......................................................................... CODE @ECHO OFF goto %config% :ONE LH a:\Dos\MSCDEX.EXE /D:cd1 /l:m cls echo. echo Ready to install new image onto this system. echo. echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! echo !!!!! Warning !!!!! echo !!!!! All data will be lost !!!!! echo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! echo. pause echo Please wait while image loads onto host system. for %%i in (m:\*.gho) do set image=%%i ghost.exe -fnf -fni -noscsi -nousb -clone,MODE=restore,src=%image%,dst=1,szeL -auto -afile=NUL -sure -rb :TWO call ghstwalk.exe end -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Firstly you may notice the use of the dos [menu] system. This is very useful for stopping the re-image -> re-boot -> re-image cycle. (On some of our images we remove the second menu option as it is not required for all of our operatives.) Secondly just in case you accidentally select the first option there is a PAUSE in autoexec.bat along with a reminder warning. We sometimes need to use ghost walker so it included on our boot DVDs. We call ghost with the following switches: -fnf - Do not fingerprint -fni - Disble direct IDE access -noscsi - Disable access to SCSI devices -nousb - disable USB support -clone,MODE=restore,src=%image%,dst=1,szeL - restore using %image% variable to fist drive and all partitions remain same size except last which expands to fill space. -auto - probably not required for restore. -afile-NULL - Bin errors -sure - Don't prompt me -rb - Reboot when done. Am in process of doing an inhouse guide for fellow workers which is a collection of bits and bobs gleaned from all over. When complete I will post it here too.